The founding team of Modularbank, the next-generation core banking platform, have today announced that they have sold off their first venture, financial software development firm, Icefire, to Checkout.com, the largest unicorn in EMEA and fourth largest fintech in the world. 

Icefire has been providing financial services solutions to both the public and private sectors for two decades. It has helped digitally transform several Nordic banks and played a key role in digitalising the Estonian financial services landscape and making it one of the most advanced in Europe. Customers include Skype, Swedbank, OP Financial Services, LHV, Bigbank and the Estonian Tax and Customs Board. Most recently, the company supported the development of the Estonian COVID-19 application, HOIA. Having built up the company and acquired expertise in the banking and financial services sector, the owners of Icefire (Vilve Vene, Rivo Uibo, Ove Kreison, Jan Lakspere and Jüri Kirme) went on to set up Modularbank, a next-generation core banking platform enabling banks, fintechs and any other type of company to rapidly roll out tailored financial services.

The acquisition of Icefire and its 110 technology engineers will help Checkout.com achieve its goal of creating a ‘one-stop shop’ for all things related to payments. Icefire was chosen for its outstanding track record in building complex modular financial systems over the past 18 years and its proven expertise in the sector. 

Vilve Vene, Co-founder and CEO at Modularbank and former co-founder at Icefire said: We are excited for the opportunity this acquisition offers the team at Icefire to start a new chapter with one of the world’s most promising fintechs. Having gained a huge amount of experience of developing banking technology at Icefire, our aim now, as founders of Modularbank, is to apply this learning and dedicate our efforts to creating the next generation of financial services that has the power to shape the global understanding of the role of financial services in society. ”

Clearco, the world's largest e-commerce investor and the company revolutionizing the way founders grow their businesses, today announced ambitious international expansion plans supported by two key executive hires. After launching in the UK last October and the Netherlands last month, Clearco is also planning on rapidly expanding its European footprint and operations. In addition, it plans to start its expansion into Asian Pacific markets by the end of 2021. The announcement comes on the heels of the company's Series C capital raise at an almost US$2 Billion valuation, and rebranding from Clearbanc to Clearco.

To accelerate its ambitious international expansion plans, Clearco has identified several potentially high-growth markets and added two seasoned executives to its leadership team. 

Longtime Clearco advisor and investor Ruma Bose, serial entrepreneur, former president of Chobani Ventures and the Chobani Foundation, and international best-selling author has joined as Chief Growth Officer. Bose is a seasoned business executive with a track record of helping operationalize the international expansion plans of US brands. Bose is also a global leader in helping companies achieve business goals while having a positive impact on society.

"Clearco continues to lead the world in the growth capital space with our unique pay-as-you-grow model," said Michele Romanow, co-founder and president. "We are excited to welcome Ruma as we know she has the experience to drive our ambitious international expansion plans and the passion and commitment to lead a mission-driven organization that has real impact and is truly changing the world."

 At Clearco, Bose will be responsible for ensuring the company has the right strategy to win outside of North America, and enter multiple markets across Europe and key markets in Asia Pacific this year. Bose said. "I am inspired by the way Clearco is democratizing access to capital and the real impact that it has had in changing the face of entrepreneurship by funding more female business founders and entrepreneurs of color *. This company is doing industry-changing work with its technology and products, while defining a new category for itself and its competitors. With global markets preparing for a recovery in 2021, this is a critical time to support the businesses that can create jobs and fuel growth."

Sarah Clark, who led Paypal's growth across EMEA and has held senior roles at Barclays Bank, Virgin Group, Sainsbury's, and British Airways, has joined as UK Head and Clearco's first international country manager. At Clearco UK, Clark will bolster and expand Clearco's presence in the United Kingdom, building a stronger brand presence and more meaningful relationships with UK-based founders.  Clark commented: "Since entering the UK market beginning in October 2020, we've invested £70M into more than 250 UK companies, including Druids Golf, Safiyaa, and Piglet. I believe every founder building a business in the UK should be working with Clearco and I'm excited to help make that possible."

"As we look to expand across the globe, we know there are almost 600 million entrepreneurs in the world, who will be fueling the future of the global economy," said co-founder and CEO Andrew D'Souza."We believe ultimately that whoever and wherever you are, if you're a founder building a business, you should be working with Clearco."

*Clearco is having an undeniable impact on the world of business as it literally "changes the face" of investing. With proprietary algorithms that are gender-, race-, and region-agnostic, Clearco is unique in the world for its commitment and ability to fuel entrepreneurship outside of traditional networks and regions. While global VC funding for female founders dropped by 27% in 2020, according to Crunchbase, Clearco funded eight times as many companies headed by female founders as traditional VC firms. In that same timeframe, 13% of Clearco's funding went to companies headed by founders of color, compared to 2.6% for traditional VC firms; in total a third of Clearco funding went to founders of color. 

In addition, Clearco's algorithms "spread the wealth" geographically. At Clearco UK, 70% of businesses that have been funded are located outside of London. In the US market, Clearco has funded businesses in all states, but well over half of the company's funding goes to businesses outside of the 4 major states that are traditional funding hot spots.

TrueFX, a purpose-built OTC market designed for the buy-side, today announced that Straits Financial Services Pte Ltd (“Straits Financial”), a Capital Markets Services License company based in Singapore, has joined TrueFX as a clearing member to enhance their clients’ access to forex liquidity. 

As a TrueFX Clearing Member (TCM), Straits Financial will provide FX brokers and buy-side firms of all sizes with direct market access to liquidity on TrueFX. Users benefit from access to all market makers on the venue, who in turn can provide them with customized pricing. 

Raymond Mok, Straits Financial Global Head of FX said: “As a leading financial institution in Asia, we want to provide our institutional clients with fair, transparent, and efficient access to the market. TrueFX aligns with these values, and we are pleased to join the network as a clearing member and demonstrate our commitment to this exciting initiative."

“The size and scale of our growing clearing network allows us to offer significant cost savings to even more clients, brought around by the venue’s integrated liquidity, clearing and technology”, said Harpal Sandhu, CEO of Integral and technology provider for TrueFX. “We are thrilled that Straits Financial has joined as a clearing member and their participation will greatly enhance the offering available to clients.”

The TCM network allows institutions of all sizes to directly access liquidity on TrueFX from leading market makers without an intermediary. Users also have the option to clear through Jefferies FXPB, the central credit counterparty for TrueFX. 

Launched last year, TrueFX has already achieved Best New Product in the 2020 Markets Choice Awards in recognition of the significant cost savings and operational efficiencies delivered by the venue. Market participants can find out more and register interest at truefx.com.

TORA, provider of the industry’s most advanced cloud-based order and execution management system (OEMS) and portfolio management system (PMS), has announced the appointment of Sales Director, Mike Langton.

Langton was previously Head of APAC Sales at Enfusion and Head of Client On-boarding & Sales at Linedata and QRMO. Langton joins TORA as Sales Director APAC, working closely with Jethro Glover to grow TORA’s multi asset all in one trading platform to Asian buy-side and sell-side firms.

TORA’s award winning PMS, OMS and EMS products have gone from strength to strength over the last 18 months, and the company is flourishing throughout the globe with some significant new client wins against the competition and expansion into FX and Fixed Income markets.

Chris Jenkins, Managing Director at TORA stated “Mike will be a brilliant addition to our global sales team. His experience and knowledge of the industry is second to none, and will certainly help to widen TORA’s all in one OEMS and PMS offering to new Asian markets.”

“I'm delighted to be joining TORA, I have followed the company closely throughout my career and am really looking forward to joining the innovative in-house developers and award winning client service teams.” commented Langton.

Langton will be focused on expanding TORA’s all in one solution. TORA’s all in one offering gives clients’ access to one system across all asset classes with optimal workflow efficiencies and ability to scale with their front and back office operations. The system offers multi-asset, multi-region trading technology covering bonds, equities, futures, options and FX.

TORA’s PMS delivers an automated general ledger, real time swap finance modeling, enhanced SWAP support functionality that can create and track specific cash flow streams during any stage of the contract. The system also delivers integrated tracking of P&L indicators and daily accrued interest with single-click actions, flexible charting dashboards and extensive cash flow reports available on the fly.

Payhawk, the growing platform that combines expense, payment and invoice management in one solution, today announced that it now integrates directly with global accounting software provider DATEV. This will enable users to save time, minimise errors, and benefit from added security, in order to fully comply with German National accounting regulations and GoBD compliance.

Hristo Borisov, CEO and Founder of Payhawk, says: “As remote working has boomed around the world, digitisation of expense management processes has increased dramatically too. We want to ensure that all companies doing this important work are doing so accurately, securely, and compliantly. We are delighted to be integrating with DATEV, and looking to offering a robust service to our users”

The process of uploading information into an accounting system can be fraught with error -- the integration between Payhawk and DATEV seeks to change this. In practice: when a company extracts all relevant and important data from its expenses, including custom fields, the next logical step is to send it to an accounting system.

Payhawk wants to remove all unnecessary actions from this process, in order to ensure that when a company’s expenses are reviewed in Payhawk, they are automatically pushed to DATEV. For users, this is a huge bonus, as they will no longer need to manually export and reupload data. Payhawk also ensures that the information uploaded is 100% accurate. Payhawk ensures that this is the case, by minimising the chance for mistakes, confusion or duplicates.

Payhawk provides end-to-end management of company spending. It delivers an integrated platform that manages all company spend; issuing cards for employees with built-in spend rules and collection of receipts, and automatically reconciles and extracts data from invoices in more than 60 languages. The company recently raised $20m from Klarna-backers QED Investors and others.

In a newly released Fintech 2.0 whitepaper, Money20/20, the place where the global fintech community does business, lays out its vision for the next era of fintech, as we enter the recovery phases of COVID-19. The paper predicts seismic shifts for the industry - most notably that digital currencies will become widely adopted in the banking sector in the next three to five years.

In this whitepaper on the future of fintech, Money20/20 predicts that one of the major winners of this new era of fintech will be digital currencies, with five of the ten largest economies having Central Bank Digital currencies in the market in the next three to five years. While existing digital currency and crypto players such as Bitcoin and Ethereum will have a role to play in supporting crypto entry for emerging economies, Money20/20 predicts that most developed economies will soon begin to issue their own tokens backed by governments.

The research further suggests enormous potential for fintech companies in this tipping point, predicting that three of the top ten slots of the world’s most valuable companies will be in the fintech sector in the next five years much like tech companies taking 7 of the top 10 slots in the past decade.

There are key drivers that play a role in determining the next era of fintech. The current macro environment which the world resides in, the operational changes taking place in the wider technology space, and the way in which data is playing a much larger role in creating efficiencies, will factor into the changes to come. Money20/20’s whitepaper argues the following five predictions will in turn become the building blocks to Fintech 2.0:

1. Assets & Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs): Five of the ten largest economies will have CBDCs in the market.
2. Banking Technology Stacks: Banking tech stacks will be predominantly cloud-based, with significant elements of core processing being open-source based.     
3. Commerce Experiences: Personalized cross-platform digital algorithms or Super-agents will represent 20% of retail commerce transactions.
4. Data: Like Windows, Unix, Mac, Android and iOS today, Data platforms will become the new operating system as the industry shifts from Big Data to Good Data.
5. Ecosystem: Fintech companies will take three of the top ten slots of the most valuable companies.

Money20/20 has helped bring the sharpest visions of where the future of fintech lies and some of the new ideas shaping it. After a decade of being at the center of the inflection point between the financial services and technology industry, this latest research furthers Money20/20’s mission of facilitating and driving conversation on the future of fintech and is designed to straddle the line between audacity and reality to generate thought and discussion which will pave the way for better days ahead.

Sanjib Kalita, Editor in Chief at Money20/20 said of the research: “Fintech has become a vital part of the economy during COVID-19 and will become even more critical as we enter this recovery phase. Just as the last downturn triggered Fintech 1.0, the pandemic accelerated digital adoption and triggered a new era of fintech, which we are calling Fintech 2.0. 

Scarlett Sieber, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at Money20/20 added: “The next era of fintech we believe is going to be special. We have been privy and fortunate enough to have conversations with key industry players over the years to understand how we are going to see these incredible changes move the needle for the sector. Money20/20 has helped to facilitate and engage in key conversations around fintech for its major turning points over the past decade, and we’re excited to once again be at the forefront as we move into this new era.”

Money20/20’s whitepaper ‘The Building Blocks of Fintech 2.0’ can be accessed here and you can join the debate at MoneyFest, Money 20/20’s digital event in July and during the2021 Money20/20 shows live in Amsterdam and Las Vegas where we come together as a community to take this discussion further. 

Firmenich, the world's largest privately-owned fragrance and taste company, has joined the UN Global Compact CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Taskforce, the first-ever global initiative promoting sustainable corporate finance and scalable investments in pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By signing the first UN-backed principles for integrated SDG finance and investment, Firmenich is driving corporate finance strategies with real-world Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) impacts and helping to create a sustainable financial system.

"As stewards of trillions of dollars in corporate finance, CFOs have a critical role to play in ensuring that companies' financial strategies are sustainable," said Benoit Fouilland, Chief Financial Officer, Firmenich. "At Firmenich, our strategy is grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals and since signing the UN Global Compact in 2008, we became one of only 41 LEAD companies worldwide recognized for their commitment to a new era of sustainability. Joining the CFO Taskforce is a natural next step for us and a great opportunity to continue advancing sustainability in global business."

"We are very pleased to welcome Firmenich, with its recognized track record in sustainability, on the CFO task force. The Principles for SDG-aligned Corporate Finance enable the broader finance ecosystem to scale up financing and investments towards the SDGs and ensure that we leave no-one behind," said Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and Executive Director of the UN Global Compact. "This is the right and opportune thing to do as the long term success of business is inextricably linked to a sustainable future for all."

Firmenich's actions are guided by the UN Global Compact's overarching Ten Principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption. Furthermore, the SDGs are firmly embedded in the Group's growth strategy, providing scope for its action. Learn more about Firmenich's progress in its Performance & Sustainability Report 2020 and its ambitious sustainability objectives for the next decade in ESG Ambitions 2030. A board member of the Global Compact Network Switzerland for a decade, Firmenich is helping to accelerate the impact of the SDGs in Switzerland.

As custodians of over $14 trillion a year in corporate investment globally, CFOs can be a driving force for the achievement of the SDGs, as interest in sustainable and responsible investment grows worldwide.

By working across the investment value chain, including investors, banks, development finance institutions, credit ratings agencies and sustainability assessment firms, the CFO taskforce and Firmenich share the aim of creating a broad, liquid and efficient market for SDG investments and capital flows. The taskforce has pinpointed four key areas: SDG impact and measurement, integrated SDG strategies and investments, corporate SDG Finance and SDG communication and reporting.

The CFO Principles on Integrated SDG Investment and Finance, which are intended to supplement the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact, are available for download here.

Broctagon Fintech Group, the multi-asset liquidity and brokerage technology provider, today announces the appointment of Michael Lee as Head of FX Sales to support its move towards establishing a greater presence in the APAC region.

Lee comes from 19 years’ experience in the futures markets and has been at the forefront of trading innovation throughout his career. In 2008, he led the set up of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia branches of Phillip Futures. He was also part of the team that initiated the roll out of an online trading platform for local and global markets to their clients. Prior to joining Broctagon, he held numerous senior positions in trading, including heading up the Futures and Options business at Maybank Investment Bank before being promoted to Regional Head of Maybank.

At Broctagon, he will be responsible for driving the growth of its liquidity solutions, targeting the institutional space as a priority. Michael will also identify opportunities and implement strategies to onboard new licenced entities, such as institutional brokers, hedge funds, family funds, and asset managers.

This hire follows the recent appointment of Cecilia Chan, who is another sell-side veteran, to Head of FX at Broctagon Prime Markets, the group’s Asian Liquidity division.

Michael Lee, Head of FX Sales at Broctagon Fintech Group, said: “Broctagon is perfectly aligned with the future of trading. I started my career on the trading floor in 1995 and have witnessed the gradual growth in demand for more sophisticated technology. There’s plenty of opportunity in the Asian FX markets and Broctagon is well-positioned to play a big role in the region’s trading innovation, particularly with its newly established Labuan business. The vision, aspiration, and the commitments of the company to transform trading across Asia are what drove me to join in their journey. Cecelia and I have also had successful partnerships before at both Phillip Futures and Maybank, so I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together this time around.”

Don Guo, CEO of Broctagon, said: “We’re pleased to have Michael on board to help manage the growth of our FX business. It’s clear that Michael has always strongly believed that successful trading will become increasingly dependent on technology, so he’s a natural fit for the company. The aim is to onboard big players in Asia and, like us, Michael believes that our liquidity solutions can play a pivotal role in deepening liquidity and empowering financial institutions to improve their trading abilities holistically. We believe that offering solutions that are purpose-built with his knowledge will give us greater insight into the inner workings and operational challenges of leading financial institutions.”

The Quality Franchise Association ( QFA ), a not for profit trade association that supports the franchising community has reported significant growth despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

The association which was only formed in November 2018 has had half it's history to date in the pandemic supporting franchise businesses through the crisis.

Despite being a new association the QFA has grown rapidly. Delivering practical support & innovations to grow franchising, providing self employment & employment opportunities. Some of these innovations include the UK's first virtual franchise show, the UK's first Virtual Franchising Awards sponsored by Barclays & a free online franchise training platform.

In just over 2 years the QFA has grown to over 170 members, has lectured at Universities & is now even planning international expansion. You can read about the QFA's incredible journey so far here https://www.franchise-association.org.uk/qfa-whats-behind-the-badge/

Joel Bissitt, CEO comments: "Our rapid growth & success can be attributed to our amazing Board of Directors & membership that share our values. The QFA is run on a voluntary basis, by members for members. We listen to our members & all of our innovations, success & growth are down to their feedback & support."

Linedata, a global provider of asset management and credit technology, data and services, today announced Baillie Gifford, the global independent investment firm, has extended its partnership with a new five-year agreement to deploy Linedata Icon, Linedata’s flagship fund accounting platform. Baillie Gifford will additionally be introducing Linedata Icon ASP for a three-year contract.

The new agreement will allow Baillie Gifford to continue to leverage the platform as its primary accounting book of record solution for ABOR activities, along with NAV calculation. The inclusion of Linedata Icon ASP will introduce new resource capabilities for Baillie Gifford through outsourcing of daily support tasks.

Aldric Dupaïs, Linedata’s Global Head of Fund Services said: “Linedata Icon’s extended capabilities will enable Baillie Gifford to continue developing its fund accounting processes. We always aim to be a strategic partner for our clients, supporting them in digital transformation.”

The two companies have a longstanding relationship that has grown over time, with Baillie Gifford having used Linedata’s Icon fund administration service for over two decades as well as recently introducing Linedata Navquest, the Linedata NAV validation and price dissemination solution.

Linedata Icon has enabled Baillie Gifford teams to manage funds on a single platform, with automation of back-office processes, including NAV checks and reporting and repetitive tasks– which has proved especially useful with remote working due to Covid-19.

Linedata Icon’s scalability and flexibility make it easy to integrate with other systems, facilitates data provisioning and delivers performance enhancements, while ensuring business continuity.